Bike Advocacy: Bike Program for Inner City Kids

The Ride of Their Lives

What do you do with 10 inner-city kids whose lives are so wrecked by shootings, poverty and methamphetamines that they got tossed out of every school that tried to help them? You take them out to the middle of nowhere and put them on bikes.

robin chotzinoff

You don't win over a classroom of troubled city kids by standing on a table and reciting poetry. Jeff knows that. He knows that with this crowd, in fact, nothing will win over the whole group, period. So he simply does what he knows best: He takes them far from home, shows them how to wear a helmet and grip the handlebar and puts them all on bikes.

And then he hopes that one of them, or maybe two or three, finds something to hold onto.

The next day, in a warm spring drizzle, the St. Paul teens and a gas-station clerk stare at each other. You can almost hear the clerk thinking: Why are black people passing through Mandan, North Dakota?

Fifty miles farther west, the land begins to undulate, and red canyons and buttes appear. Bodies pile out of the bus at a Civilian Conservation Corps campground a few miles from the Maah Daah Hey Trail.

"See this, girl? This is cow shit."

"No way. That's buffalo shit."

"How you know? You ain't never see no wild animals."

Today's ride is a 3-mile singletrack loop that could take 30 minutes or two hours, depending on the group's attitude.

"Doesn't matter," Rick says. "We're here to have fun."

The trail roller-coasters from canyon bottoms to butte tops, over dry creeks and chalky cliffs—scenic and remote, but doable. August, one of the few who rode enthusiastically the day before, quickly drops the rest of the pack, taking a wrong turn. Jeff is dispatched to haul him back.

"You can't do that," Rick explains patiently. "You gotta stay with a partner. You could get lost out here."

But when two old couples appear on horses, he gathers around with the others, curious. "Are you all having fun out here?" one old lady asks. "You're from St. Paul? I think that's just wonderful!"

Sensing a politely captive audience, Loralena pushes to the front of the group. Standing in the middle of the trail, tough and red-haired, like a sort of hip-hop Annie Oakley, she launches into the story of the M tattooed on her arm: "My daughter's father thinks it's about him because his name is Mark, but I was, like, 13 then, and now it ain't about him, no matter what he thinks."

The boys try to hit a few jumps while the girls cheer, and everyone finishes the ride hungry and ready to chill at the campground. Then the adults decide to do a second loop, with or without kids.

Night around here is scarier for the kids, somehow, than the worst city neighborhood. "I've been in North Dakota before," says Laurie, sitting around the campfire. Dressed in black, with a short haircut and sinewy arms, she projects a butch look and a hardened past. "I got into some auto theft, and the judge sent me to one of these weird old Western towns," she says.

Laurie was 13 at the time, depressed because her best friend, also 13, had hung himself. "I wasn't mad, I was sad," she remembers. "We did everything together, steal cars, rob people's houses, all like that." They also had quieter times—Laurie still treasures the sketchbooks her friend left behind.

Back in Minnesota, she began losing ground at school, sliding into the orbit of two older brothers in jail who still functioned effectively as gang soldiers. Entering Project Lead felt like her last option. The idea of graduating from high school entered her head. In some ways, Project Lead is her family, complete with the annoying brothers, the dorky authority figures and Loralena, with whom she shares everything, including cigarettes and one side of the earbuds attached to her iPod.